Tracking toy tariffs

Pretty good chat on the subject of tariffs and Super7 on last night's episode of Toy Anxiety:

Blake Wright from Toy Collector magazine pops in at about the 45 minute mark and adds a bit more on Super7's situation. Now, his info comes from Brian so judge it accordingly, but the impetus for this sounds like the latest wave of turtles figures got nailed with the full tariff amount of 145%. Which, that sucks, but as the conversation leading up to that details and our discussions here, there are obviously other factors at play unique to Super7 (high prices, poor quality, etc.). Half the work force was laid off including 15 members of the design team knocking that division down from 20 people to 5. I'm not a toy insider, but if your design team shrinks 75% then that tells me you're not expecting to produce much new product for the foreseeable future. It sounds like Super7 has already shifted to "trying to keep the lights on" mode as opposed to planning for rough waters ahead. While Blake doesn't come out and offer an opinion on the future of the company, it sure seems hard to be optimistic right now.

I don't think I've been shy at levying criticism at the feet of Super7 for their products, but I do hope that there is some kind of immediate relief for the companies who got nailed with the 145% tariff rate now that it's quickly been cut down. That just all together sucks as far as timing goes. It would be ridiculous if they have to wait to file their taxes for next year for some kind of relief, that needs to happen now, but the current state of government is such a shit show I doubt it happens.
 
When you lay off all those designers, do they become contractors to S7 rather than full time employees at a later date? That sucks, I felt like S7's design work was upper level and production/manufacturing knocks the quality down to average or worse.
Jeeze, I'm a big fan of pro wrestling and bit of the other fighting sports. They always get a bad rap of being a "dirty business". Sometimes I think the toy business is on par. Take Vince McMahon out of the equation and Hasbro might be worse than the WWE, for example
 
I hate to put it this way, but fuck it.

If your entire company's workforce rides on a singular wave of figures getting hit with tariffs, you were never in all that great of a position as a company, anyway.

And depsite what he says, Brian was funding older projects with newer preorder funds. It was essentially a Ponzi. And it finally caught up to him. This was bound to happen sooner or later.

It's only too bad that people working for him had to suffer as a result.
 
When you run a company that is constantly producing new inventory, you're always funding projects with whatever cash you have on hand. Super7's model isn't really any different from anyone else, we're just exposed to it. Hasbro/Mattel/etc. solicit product to vendors too, and if interest is so low that it might not turn a profit then they cancel it too. We just don't see it happen with the same regularity. When any company puts up a wave of figures at X amount, there's always a prediction baked into it for costs that can't be determined in the moment like shipping and tariffs. You make up for any shortfalls with the next batch of figures. Super7 wants people to think they're more like a boutique, but they don't actually operate in that fashion.

What's killed Super7 isn't hard to figure out: high price, low quality. That's pretty much it. Compound that with iffy character selection in some lines and it makes it even worse. When all of that product two years ago was hitting clearance that should have scared the crap out of them and probably did, but did they make any meaningful changes in response to that? I don't think an extra elbow and knee joint on a turtle is going to move the needle. It sure feels like consumers have been telling them that they're product isn't worth what they're charging and have been doing so for quite some time and now it's coming to a head.
 
Now that Super7 has already laid off 75% of their designers, I'd be fine if they folded altogether. Their ReAction figures have become as tired and stale as Funko Pops and they've failed to exercise basically any quality control over their Ultimates line for five years. Furthermore, whenever a YouTuber or interviewer calls them out for their shoddy QC, Flynn gets super defensive and blames the community for asking too much of his $50+ toys. What an ass. I know he's already been pushed to the side and is no longer calling the shots at Super7, but whoever took over doesn't seem to be doing much better. Their reputation is so tarnished at this point that I'm not sure there's really much to salvage.
 
RicksNerdLife said:
I hate to put it this way, but fuck it.

If your entire company's workforce rides on a singular wave of figures getting hit with tariffs, you were never in all that great of a position as a company, anyway.

And depsite what he says, Brian was funding older projects with newer preorder funds. It was essentially a Ponzi. And it finally caught up to him. This was bound to happen sooner or later.

It's only too bad that people working for him had to suffer as a result.
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I don't collect Super7 and don't really have any opinions on them, but in general, this is the approach of a lot of small- and medium-sized businesses where revenue from sales is immediately reinvested in the business for subsequent product development and/or manufacturing. It's not a Ponzi scheme, more of a cash-flow issue.

It's the whole reason the tariffs are disastrous for most businesses. Only the largest businesses can absorb a 145% increases on costs without it entirely wiping out their margins. And when it's as sudden as it was with the Trump tariffs, it hits hard.

Assuming the 30% tariffs stick and then even go away basically entirely at some point later in the year, there will still be a huge amount of small businesses and a considerable amount of medium-sized businesses like Super7 that will go out of business entirely. The tariffs made entire business models obsolete over night. And, sure, those companies could've had more cash on hand I guess. But they didn't, and, to be fair, this was an entirely manufactured and unnecessary crisis brought on them.
 
Well, what truly killed then was overproducing, I would say.

Like you said, they claimed to be boutique, BUT...wanted to be bigger than they are. Which there is nothing inherently wrong with. But you're seeing the results.

Edit: meant for this to be directed at Misfit. 😀
 
Misfit said:
What's killed Super7 isn't hard to figure out: high price, low quality. That's pretty much it.
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Only speaking for myself, but this right here is what kept me from going all-in on their lines. When I started collecting toys, they were in wave 1 of Thundercats and Lion-O was like $40 at the time. Great starter, and Ever Living Mumm-Ra (I think) came in at $60? Anyway, pretty cheap stuff for what you were getting. Quality could have been better, but the sculpts were nice and the accessories were plentiful. Fast forward a couple years and they have Snarf at $55 (with his purse and a piece of fruit) and larger characters at $75-$90 (Luna is $93 on BBTS currently), and none of them are much better in quality than the earlier stuff at lower prices.

I would have been fine with the higher-priced larger characters if Snarf had evened it out at $30-$35, but $55 was just robbery. And of course, by that point, what are you going to do? Not buy Snarf? He completed the team, so we were all stuck. I did skip on Snarfer, though. And outside of a few of their TMNT offerings, I've largely avoided those as well except for the stuff that hit clearance a while back.
 
What killed Super7 for me personally was the whole Silverhawks "we can't do them in shiny metal so just be happy with the cartoon versions" and then they start releasing the metal versions after 4 of the main 'hawks are done already. I bought Kidd to finish the five but won't buy anything else they do. I hate it because I do like their Dekkion and Tiamat.
 
I wonder who else could tackle the Thundercats and Silverhawks next? It'll be a new style and scale probably. Will they go as deep as Super 7 did? My ideal world is they do a few more waves of each to tie up the lines.
 
Super7 have had a few lines I've been interested in but haven't pulled the trigger because of my experience with their 2001: A Space Odyssey figures. I owned the whole line at one point. Soft sculpts, chunky paint that flaked off at the joints, tubes on the spacesuits easily mangled... they had to go. I still have the Monolith on my bookshelf, at least.
 
Chooch555 said:
I wonder who else could tackle the Thundercats and Silverhawks next? It'll be a new style and scale probably. Will they go as deep as Super 7 did? My ideal world is they do a few more waves of each to tie up the lines.
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I'm going with the stock answer so often given, but if Jada did either or both of these, I'd be down. I liked Super7's licensing choices but not their actual product.
 
I do think the Super7 Ultimate Turtles stuff looks great. Very interesting concept to try and make "ultimate" versions of the original toy line vs. a media source like the cartoon. I noticed almost everything single wave for it is on BBTS still, most with a discount. That seems unusual.
 
There are a lot of lines that Super7 had that I passed on because Super7 was making them. I like Super7's sculpts and design work, but the cheap waxy plastic look, bad QC, even the 7 inch scale was a (slight) deterrent. I loved how deep they went with Thundercats. I love that they made such ridiculous and far out character designs with really fun accessories. But the price combined with the idea that these were "non functional" action figures made me pass. I have 0 Thundercats figures.

Ultimately (heh) it wasn't that the figs were just overproduced, it was that Bryan leaned hard into the FOMO sales tactic and stressed ordering directly from them. But then it became the boy who cried wolf. In playing chicken with the customer, hoping they wanted 3D representations of their favorite IPs enough, it turned out the customer was largely OK on missing out if it meant not losing $55+ to a sub par figure that didn't live up to the hype. And so that seemed to collapse their production based on preorder model, to a degree.

I've never made an action figure before, and I'm sure there's a lot of factors that allowed S7 to feel justified in their model. At the end of the day, it comes down to: why don't these figures feel good enough at ~$55? And is it a customer expectation problem, or is it mismanagement at S7? are they cheapening out at the factory, or is this the best they can do to keep their teams compensated with decent enough wages? Why can NECA make something comparable for ~$20 less? Is there any way S7 could ape their model instead? If not, Bryan should really be breaking that down in his pitches. We are a scrupulous consumer base.

It really sucks, though, if tariffs do them in. I imagine the new TMNT line may have been something they were counting on to regroup around and push forward. Having that arbitrarily destroyed on the whims of DJT is an absolute fucking insult and injustice. I really hope they take the hit, sit in the coffin for a while, and resurrect themselves in a little while with a brand new approach to figure making, top to bottom.
 
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